David Claerbout: Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years

For his solo exhibition at Konschthal Esch, his first one in Luxembourg, Belgian artist David Claerbout chose the title Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years. 

Implying the accumulation of time conducted by his practice as if it were scientific research or a life cycle, the title points to the scope of the exhibition, which brings together a condensed yet layered selection of both recent and earlier works by the artist. Ranging from experimental cinema and video installations to digital animation and generative moving images, Claerbout’s art practice is a relentless exploration of the status, function, and impact of the technical image. However, his works are not entirely devoted to exposing the underlying mechanism of photographic imagery in the digital era, nor are they exclusively determined by the repercussions of its circulation through and between communication systems. Rather, Claerbout’s project processes images as a synonym of vision, or more accurately, as a synonym of the diffusion of vision, memory, and hallucination established by and in his practice. Mistaken at times for being an artist celebrating advanced technologies, a high-tech artist, so to speak, Claerbout’s primary interest lies in the ways we perceive images on a cognitive-sensorial-neurological level. His motivation is to create what he once named “the photographic madness” through technical imagery diffusing vision, memory, and hallucination, and to reconcile it with a “casual, daily, innocent visual perception.” In an interview with curator Ory Dessau, Claerbout expressed this aim as follows: “with madness I refer, with the most banal intentions, to the relationship, or rather the rupture, between your eyes, your perceived world, and your hallucinations […]. [My] work is an attempt to let viewers encounter aggressive images in an un-shocking manner. I don’t believe in the liberating effect of shock-images, which is why I prefer to work with virtual images. By virtual I don’t mean non-existent. The virtual has nothing to do with the object not being there. Instead, it suggests that the object can no longer go back to where it came from, nor arrive to where it was seemingly intended. To me, the virtual is always, already, in-between.”

Claerbout’s practice reaches states of madness by destabilising the distinction between stillness and motion (as seen, among other works, in The Close [2022]), inside and outside (e.g., in Breathing Bird [2012]), real documentation and artificial reconstruction (demonstrated in a work like Olympia [The real time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the course of a thousand years] [begun 2016]), appropriation and production (e.g., in Aircraft [F.A.L.] [2015–2021]), and repetition and difference (as is the case with the work The pure necessity [2016]).

Claerbout’s ability to transcend and undermine dichotomies and oppositions informs most of his works. The most recent one is The woodcarver and the forest (2025), whose second chapter debuts at Konschthal Esch.

David Claerbout (b. 1969) has been developing a unique, self-reflexive approach to the production, presentation, and perception of images. Claerbout’s interest in the merging of the human and the technological (and vice versa) is a thread that underlies his practice, informing his images, films, installations, and drawings. Claerbout’s work was the subject of many monographic exhibitions in leading art institutions in Europe and America, e.g., Wiels in Brussels, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), and Schaulager in Basel, among other institutions.

Guest curator: Ory Dessau; curators: Christian Mosar (director, Konschthal Esch), assisted by Charlotte Masse.